Bill Nye's '77 Solar Noon Indicator over Rhodes Hall

Bill Nye "the Science Guy", Mechanical Engineering class of
1977, dedicated a unique clock that he donated to Cornell for the facade of Rhodes Hall at a ceremony
on August 27, 2011. Beside simply telling the time of day, this clock
illustrates the difference between legal and solar time by letting
light illuminate a disk at the precise time when the sun culminates
overhead. In memory of his parents, Bill Nye personally designed the
clock and its light guide. See Bill Nye's lecture here.

From left to right and top to bottom: Bill Nye '77 "the Science Guy" personally directs tests of the Solatube system
above the roof of Rhodes Hall on March 27, 2008. The Solar Noon
controller team works with Bill on October 19, 2009, and later enjoys
Chef Harold Evans' table at North Star. Electric Time
and Cornell Facilities raise the clock on August 3, 2011. The Solar
Noon indicator is fully-operational on August 18, 2011. Note the
contrast between the indicator with closed dimmer valve (left) and open
valve (right). JB Rajsky poses on the roof and near the clock. Michel Louge shows the Solatube
Fresnel lens that collects ambient light for the clock face. He poses
in front of the clock on August 19, 2011 at Solar Noon. Bottom: Bill
Nye'77 shares details of his parents' WWII history in front of the
display case in the Rhodes Hall lobby.

Solar energy

This workbook uses solar
ephemeris to calculate the fraction of radiation collected by PV solar
panels at a fixed orientation in 2014. For subsequent years, follow
instructions therein after downloading the new ephemeris from http://navastro.com/downloads/catalogue.php, or look for updates on this page.

Combustion engines

This zipped document contains
several Matlab and other files to implement simple models for Otto and
Diesel engines. This worksheet
contains a fit of the properties of water. Michel Louge currently serves as advisor to the Cornell Baja SAE team.

Dynamics of student-designed machines in MAE2250
"Mechanical Synthesis" at Cornell: Wind-pump and air cart

M.Y. Louge: The surprising relevance of a continuum description to granular clusters

Nature shuns
homogeneity. In turbulent clouds, industrial reactors and geophysical
flows, discrete particles arrange in clusters, posing difficult
challenges to theory. A persistent question is whether clusters can be
modeled with continuum equations. Recent evidence indicates that
suitable equations can predict the formation of clusters in granular
flows, despite violating the simplifying assumptions upon which they
are based.

This 2003 position paper
summarizes
research challenges for gas-solid suspensions. It was written for a
workshop organized by the US DOE at the University of Illinois in May
2002.

Requests for information were written for NASA in 2007 and 2008. This 2009 position paper to the
decadal survey articulates the need for granular research for space
exploration.

Patents

US patents 5459406
and 5546006 are licensed to
Capacitec, Inc.
Their practical use is to measure the density, velocity or other
physical parameters affecting dielectric suspension properties (e.g.,
humidity) of granular suspensions. Their principal advantage is to
possess a small measurement volume of know extent, and to be deployable
through conductive walls held at the ground voltage. Applications have
included catalytic cracking, lost-foam casting, stratigraphy of the
snow pack, sand dunes,
snow avalanches, etc.

The shock tube of the High Temperature Gasdynamics Laboratory, picture taken circa 1981.

This zipped file contains FORTRAN source codes for calculating chemical kinetic mechanisms. Compile
intp.f to create interactively subroutines containing the mechanism
with rate constants contained in the file DABA.LIB. (This file should
probably be updated with more recent rate constants...). Then, run the
program kin.f with its subroutine created by intp.f. Examples for
CO and OH mechanisms are provided in two separate folders.